


Listen to the nightingale (but do not follow in her footsteps)

by unfortunatesideeffects



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: AU, Domestic, Gen, M/M, Post-Captain America: The Winter Soldier, college students, no serum
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-29
Updated: 2014-09-27
Packaged: 2018-02-06 17:05:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1865649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unfortunatesideeffects/pseuds/unfortunatesideeffects
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>The heart has four chambers, so he's told, but beneath that steady gaze they all blur into one, and it is bursting at its seams.</i>
</p><p> </p><p> </p><p>A college au that's not really about college; it's what happens in the quiet places on the edges of whatever it is people ostensibly 'do' with their lives. The important things that you don't talk about at dinner parties, or fill out on forms, but which are the real stuff of which life is made.</p><p>Or: there is no serum, WWII is long gone - but there are still things to survive, and Steve and Bucky live by following each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Un-beta'd because I'm new, and know nobody. Constructive criticism not discouraged.
> 
> I am also [unfortunatesideeffects](http://unfortunatesideeffects.tumblr.com/) on tumblr.

He comes home at nine and the apartment is dark and warm and quiet, Steve's desk lamp a solitary lighthouse in the shadowed topography of kitchen table, sofa, chairs. Steve is neck deep in exam prep, and his corner of their shoebox home is papered with incomprehensible post-its that shout things like “DOMAIN OF DANGER: WHICH SEAL IS SAFE???” and “PANDA'S THUMB!! WTF, GOD?” (pertaining to biology, apparently) in blocky, childish capitals.

 

When he writes long-hand – hipster-chic snail-mail, or in his sketchbook – Steve's letters are slanted and sleek, fatly rounded on the a's, o's, d's; old-fashioned, elegant. He does it on purpose, Bucky knows. It matters to him how the writing says what it says, not just that it does, and he takes care with it, like he does with all his art. But come cram time, all bets are off and he reverts to second-grade standards, all upper-case, no superfluous curlicues or gracile bends, just barely blunt and able enough to be worthy of a pen-licence. It makes something in Bucky ache, a little, to see him hunched over his desk like that, juggling so many sticky paper scraps he's running out of surfaces to tack them to. His bare toes twitch vulnerably against the cold floorboards (he won't wear socks indoors; Bucky thinks, sometimes, that he relishes it, perhaps. Luxuriates in the shiver of cold feet without the dire associated consequences of his sickly childhood) and Bucky thinks back, back, to a scrawny, ink-fingered, determined child, sandy hair every which-way and a scowl between his light eyebrows.

 

And even though Steve's shoulders now are three times the width of then, the sight of him – so deep-sunk in study that he doesn't even notice he's being watched – makes something in Bucky's chest curl tight and small like a hedgehog rolled defensively around the soft skin of its belly; because Steve may have grown – and grown, and grown, 'til he has good inches and pounds on any normal-sized human being, and Bucky feels slight beside him – but at times like this he's small yet inside, so devoted and determined that his heart is still as easily bruised as his body ever was, and Bucky thinks (feels, knows) he would (still) do anything at all to protect it.

 

He feels it all through him, that knowledge. Tingling in his flesh-blood fingers when he jams them deep into the pockets of his jeans, third metacarpal bones digging into the meat of his own thigh and holding tight – they prickle, his fingertips. A feeling like circulation coming back, wanting to touch, as though he is already reaching forward, tiny sparks of lighting woken in a fearsome arc from the wings of Steve's shoulders outwards, across the room, into Bucky's waiting, outstretched heart. That heart that thuds more painfully, thick, when he focusses instead on the impossible distance of a scavenged rug, roadside sofa, that coffee table they hauled up three flights of fire-escape, drunk and well-entertained by their own penniless-student alt-kid daring.

 

Used to be, when Steve was sick and small and so thin in his bones that it looked like he'd crack beneath the weight of an adult's hand, Bucky would watch him. Just to check, just to make sure he was still there, still fine and whole; healthy as he could be, given the givens. But when Bucky came back – not just figuratively but  _literally_ dismembered by the accident – the tables turned a full one-eighty. Steve started watching  _him_ . For months after he got home, in that liminal state between losing the flesh of his arm and being skinned with plastic instead, he felt Steve's eyes like a flush of heat on the back of his neck; a constant, hair-raising regard. He felt splayed out, pinned-frog on a lab-bench, organs open to the air and the curious eyes of avid students. As though once Steve had seen him, anybody could, following the path Steve's eyes had made right down through the bars of his ribcage, around unsteady lungs, burrowing deep into his gun-shy heart to study all its recesses. The heart has four chambers, so he's told, but beneath that steady gaze they all blur into one, and it is bursting at its seams.

 

But now – just recently, the past few months, no more – something has changed. Instead of switching out the years or even snatching glances turn-by-turn in neat single file (no shoving, one at a time, boys), they watch each other simultaneously. They're not obvious about it. There are no long, lingering glances fit to shut out the world or bring the blood all the way up to the pointed planes of Steves high cheekbones. But they're both aware. Bucky thinks they are, anyway.  _He_ is, to be sure. He sees Steve watching him; he ducks a smile beneath his lashes and watches quietly back. They see each other at all their times – morning, breathing in coffee fumes and propped up against consecutive kitchen cabinets, shoulders only sleep-warm stretch-cotton and companionable centimetres apart; at lunch, hunched over library tables sprawling with open textbooks and hidden ziplock bags of crackers or apple slices (did you pack your own lunch, Steve? Do you have an Avengers lunchbox in there, too? Scowling - have you seen what they serve in the cafeteria, Buck? Here, this one's yours -), or sprawling themselves beneath the gnarly shade of ancient trees on the quad; at dinner, poking fun at culinary mistakes and each other, grinning like little boys (still? Always.) across the battered-scrubbed-exacto-knife-through-the-varnish top of their little kitchen table, nudging at bare ankles underneath it. Now, they are watching each other, and Bucky, at least, is not yet sure quite what it is they've seen.

 

Steve lifts his head, touches his fingers lightly to the nape of his neck like he's repeating something already felt, a haptic echo of the touch Bucky only imagined from across the room, a shared act of psychosomosis. He could wait for Steve to stretch, to crack his shoulders out, to turn finally and notice that the shadows have closed in about him and Bucky is standing in the doorway, watching from them. But that would be creepy, obviously, and abruptly he doesn't want them to be so far away. Steve hears him coming, across the old squeaky floorboard and the soft worn rug, and tips his head back in anticipation, eyes closed, his smile slight and wrong-side-up. Bucky stops behind him, sinks his fingers into soft blond hair, and Steve's smile widens and his broad shoulders, finally, relax.


	2. Part II: A Crash-Course in Indoor Meteorology.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Steve moves through the apartment like a change in the weather; slow-glowing eco-friendly bulbs hum to life in his wake, he toes that corner of the rug back into place for the thousandth time, stoops for a pillow that's slipped off the couch. By the time he's reached their six-feet-square of kitchen, Bucky is only just turning around._
> 
>  
> 
> More of the college/post-army au that is not really about college (but is a little about Bucky post-army)

Bucky sinks his fingers into soft blond hair and Steve's head lolls back against them; in a mood like this he is trusting and imperious as a house-cat, eyes closed and a lazy, inverted smile tugging a curve into his mouth. Bucky watches the way the lamplight snags differently on sun-gilt hair and the smooth curves of his own prosthetic knuckles. The gold filaments gleam like the innards of an old-fashioned light-globe, while the milky semi-translucent plastic of his hand is strikingly modern, cool, calm. There's something about the contrast that is soothing, right. He'd used that other hand – the one that came before, made of bone and sinew and sun-reddened skin – for different purposes in the war. Held knives and guns and ropes and maps, felt the grit of sand between his fingers – and that was golden, too – the trigger of his sniper rifle gently, delicately poised...

 

But here, in this room, Steve is not a war; and Bucky will not teach this new hand the same things as the old. This hand he turns to sweeter purpose. He scritches his fingertips against Steve's skull, and the upside-down-smile spreads. Finally, Steve opens his eyes; the blue is so vivid against the late-night bruises purpling his skin that Bucky catches his breath.

 

“Work late today?” Steve's voice is low, blurred at the edges from hours of speaking studious words in his mind instead of his mouth.

 

“Somethin' like that,” but he hadn't. Had spent, instead, hours wandering the unpopulated areas of Central Park, needing the cool taste of green-growing things on his tongue, to reach out his arms in both directions and touch not a single human body. Cities were difficult like that; though he loved this one like a treasured book it still overwhelmed him. So he'd walked, and walked, and then when all the lamps had been ablaze for hours and he was beginning, finally, to feel guilty and a little cold, he'd hopped the train back to Brooklyn and stopped for groceries on the way. It isn't lying, really; but sometimes it's exhausting to explain his exhaustion, even to Steve. It's tiring just to shape the feeling into words, and impossible to find the energy to speak them aloud. Steve would understand, anyway. The lie is not what's important.

 

“You been at this all day?”

 

Steve stretches, arms coming up like wings on either side of his body and then continuing upward, until he can touch Bucky's jaw with his fingertips, “Has it been just one?” his eyelashes flutter dramatically, and he makes a face as though all the cruelty of the world has caught up with him at once, “Woe,” he tells Bucky, “Woe upon the disorganised senior; for he is tragically naïve, and ill-prepared to meet the hardships of taking a first-year biol class he should've been smart enough to to know he'd need, two and a half years ago, when he actually _was_ in first year. It's terrible, Buck. They're all eighteen.”

 

“And you're so ancient,” Bucky grins down at him, thumbs circles at his temples to make Steve sigh and slump in his chair, beautific in his abandon. His arms flop back to his sides, and Bucky misses the feather-touch of those capable fingers.

 

“I am,” Steve tells him seriously, “I'm nearly thirty, Buck – _nearly thirty_. Do you know what I was supposed to have achieved by this age? Do you realise how together my life was supposed to have been? _I was meant to own a washing machine_ , Buck. I was meant to cook dinner from scratch at least three times a week, and live like a grown up in my very own closet-sized walk-up in the city!”

 

“Sorry I'm such a let-down, pal,” Steve scowls up at him, and Bucky grins, “You can move into _my_ closet, if it'll make you feel better; we'll turn your bedroom into a gym, it'll be great. But I put my foot down on the cooking thing – I ain't done nothing to deserve that.”

 

Steve gives a defeated sigh, “Lies. I've seen your closet, you know I'd never fit. I think you've found a way to breed skinny jeans in there; I'm pretty sure that's why we don't have roaches.”

 

“Are you making fun of my sound appreciation of my own assets, Steve? It's not very nice to tease a guy in my position about his looks, you know. I'm already down one arm – that sort of thing could give a man a complex.”

 

It's like a cold-water deluge; suddenly the snark is gone, and Steve's expression is utterly, unbearably open. They say hearts can be worn on sleeves, but Steve wears his in the crease between his brows, the catalogue of precise angles he can reach with the corners of his mouth, the exact latitude of his eyelashes. He reaches back again, angling his body in an arch, and this time his arms come up around Buck's ribcage, squeeze tight.

 

But he doesn't say anything about it. In a moment he's up and gone; Bucky stands still, left adrift behind the empty chair as a lag in time opens up between them. Steve alters course and he is still here, the slow-motion man, lost in the last seconds of their most recent past. Steve moves through the apartment like a change in the weather; slow-glowing eco-friendly bulbs hum to life in his wake, he toes that corner of the rug back into place for the thousandth time, stoops for a pillow that's slipped off the couch. By the time he's reached their six-feet-square of kitchen, Bucky is only just turning around.

 

He opens his eyes on a different world; soft yellow light permeates the air, bringing furnishings and books and the one wall papered-over with band posters and movie flyers and drawings – years of them, the paper curling and colours faded by the sun, Bucky's quizzical blue eyes speaking out of most of them; laughing in smudged, older colours; and darker, somehow, in the clear sharp blues of the last few months – layers upon layers of proofs of life. They make him feel steadier again, and he watches the faces on the wall while Steve clatters about in the cupboards.

 

“You gonna stand there all night, you punk? 'Cause if you leave me to tackle this pasta sauce alone, you know you'll regret it.”

 

Bucky laughs. He breaks his stillness, steps into reality again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look - I updated the wrong one! I was meant to be writing dreadful-horror-kidnapping-angst, and came up with domestic flat-sharing instead. So it goes, I suppose.
> 
> Thank you for reading,
> 
>  
> 
> [unfortunatesideeffects](http://unfortunatesideeffects.tumblr.com/)


End file.
